Why 95% of Executives Plan to Consolidate Their Document Stack This Year

A single contract might get drafted in one application, converted to PDF in a second, routed for signature in a third, and archived in a fourth. Each of those tools was probably a reasonable purchase in isolation: somebody needed a PDF converter, so they got one, and somebody else needed e-signatures a year later, so they got that too. What's likely been overlooked is how the whole process fits together, which is the part that's now costing organizations the most.

Nitro's new report, The State of AI in Document Workflows: Navigating the Gap Between AI Promises and Productivity, put real numbers behind that sprawl. Surveying over 1,300 enterprise leads across Financial Services, Legal Services, Manufacturing, Healthcare, and Real Estate in the US, UK, and Canada, it measured how fragmented the average document stack has actually become, and how much appetite there is left to fix it.

How fragmented the average document tool stack really is

Seventy-two percent of executives report that their organization runs six or more separate tools for document-related tasks. Managers, describing only their own department, put the figure at 30%.

Executives and managers are simply counting different things. A manager sees the tools their own team touches; an executive sees the whole organization, which naturally turns up more of them. Different scale, same underlying story: this kind of stack rarely gets designed on purpose, and everybody who looks closely enough finds more of it than they expected.

Why 95% of executives want to consolidate document tools

Given how tangled the stack has become, fixing it has jumped to the top of the priority list. Ninety-five percent of executives say their organization is actively evaluating or planning to consolidate its document tools within 12 months. Seventy-four percent of managers say the same about their own department. On almost nothing else in this research do the two groups agree this closely.

Executives and managers want different things from consolidation

The moment the conversation moves from "should we consolidate" to "what would make us switch," the agreement falls apart. Executives rank better AI and automation capabilities first, at 53%, ahead of integration with their existing technology stack at 41% and stronger security and compliance controls at 37%. Cost sits last on their list, at 25%.

Managers are shopping for something else entirely. Lower cost tops their list at 54%, with stronger security controls at 48% and better AI capabilities at 44% not far behind.

The split makes sense once you place each group in their own seat. Executives are buying capability for the whole organization and can absorb the price of getting it right. Managers are living inside a department budget, and cost is the lever they can actually pull. A vendor that leads with price is only speaking to half that room, and a vendor that leads with AI features is only speaking to the other half.

Third-party AI tools are already eating into the primary stack

That gap matters beyond the buying decision, because capability is exactly where the incumbents are already losing ground. At the organizational level, third-party AI tools have picked up a measurable share of document work that used to belong to the primary platform: 14% of summarization and analysis, 14% of language translation, 11% of data extraction, 10% of workflow automation, and 10% of document search.

A company didn't have to switch vendors for that to happen. An employee only had to open a second tab because the main tool couldn't do the job natively. Multiply that across a department, and a platform can lose the very capability it was supposed to own without ever losing the account.

That's the real argument for consolidating on purpose rather than waiting for the next renewal cycle. Bolting a fifth AI tool onto the stack won't fix a document that already moves through four separate applications. The stack itself, whatever's left of it, has to finally do the job.

Read the full findings in The State of AI in Document Workflows.